Tamaruq (8 page)

And finds the man standing in his way.

For the first time Mig experiences a moment of panic. He asks the man to let him pass. The man smiles – not a pleasant smile, not any more – and says he doesn’t think so. Keep calm, Mig tells himself. Make a dash for it. You’re faster than this arsehole. He sprints for the gap between man and door, but either his balance is off or the man trips him, and somehow he misses. Falls. Face down to the dust-clogged doormat, the dust clenching him in a sneeze, and then the man has his arms pinned painfully behind his back. He’s dragging Mig backwards into the house, Mig’s heels kicking uselessly against the floor. He thrashes in the man’s grasp and feels his arms yanked tighter, contorting his shoulders. Mig yelps in pain. The man hauls him up the stairs, Mig shouting and screaming with every step. All the while he’s aware of the other one, the woman, closing the front door, watching.

His panic dissolves into terror. What are they doing? What are they planning? He’s thrown into a room and the door slams, and locks.

The man’s footsteps thud down the stairs. Mig is left in the room, in silence.

He can hear his breathing, fast and ragged. The thud of his own heart against his ribcage.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Fuck
.

He’s been duped. He can see it now – feeding him the alcohol – fuelling his stories. The thought comes to him, clear as a rash. The bastards want Vikram.

They want the man who survived.

He should have known this would happen.

His head is beginning to hurt, but maybe that’s the blood racing at his temples, a dull, insistent throb. He cases the room. The window is locked. He can see the farm outbuildings, pieces of machinery at a standstill, the pink and white poppy fields and the flat skyline beyond. So empty. Nothing out there, no one to know he is here. The sun is hard and bright and low in the west. He tries to force the window open to no avail. He rattles the door handle, kicks at it, yells, ‘Let me out!’ After a few minutes the man comes back up and bangs hard on the other side.

‘Shut up, you little shit, or I’ll make you shut up.’

Mig falls silent, genuinely afraid now. He sits quietly, head pounding, shoulders aching, trying to see a way out.

Minutes pass. Longer. The sun moves lower in the sky. It must be an hour since they locked him up in here. Mig feels a great wash of despair. The Osirian will be wondering where he’s got to. What if he moves on? What if he thinks Mig’s done a runner? He looks again at the machinery out in the yard. These two could do anything to him, kilometres from any place fit for humans to live. Crush him, chop him into pieces with an axe, grind him into food for chickens.

At last he hears the heavy tread of footsteps on the stairs, followed by the click of the lock. He waits, tense. Ready to sprint. The woman slips in quick as a wasp and locks the door again before he has a chance. She stands, back to the door, regarding him, her face inscrutable.

‘Where is the man?’

Mig shakes his head. He has to hold his ground.

‘Where is the man you keep talking about?’ she repeats.

‘I was making it up.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she says. She is very calm, but not calm the way the Osirian is calm. This one is calm the way people are when they have an endgame in sight and are prepared to be ruthless. Like the Alaskan.

He’s underestimated the situation. He should have known better. The alcohol is making him slow. Stupid.

‘I was making it up,’ he repeats, but shakily.

‘You will tell us where he is.’

Mig judges it best to keep silent. He wonders, with a flush of dizziness, if the woman is going to torture him. He wonders if he can buy some time by lying, tell her the Osirian is somewhere he isn’t, give her a location that is close enough to be plausible but far enough away for Vikram to escape.

The woman reaches inside her apron pocket. Mig tenses. A knife, she’s going to have a knife. Or pliers, to pull out his fingernails with. The guerrillas have methods like that. What if this pair have connections?

She brings out a large jar with a metal screw lid.

‘Do you know what this is?’

There is something inside the jar, Mig can see. Something thin and coiled with black and red and yellow stripes, something that he’s only ever seen in pictures. Involuntarily, he jerks backwards.

‘My brother collects snakes,’ says the woman, turning the jar this way and that, studying its contents with detached interest. ‘This one is a young coral. It’s highly venomous.’

She places the jar on the floor, between them, but within easy reach. Mig can see quite clearly the outline of the snake. Its coils, each about the width of his finger, are beginning to unwind in a slow, squirming motion, no doubt seeking to escape. Mig’s legs have gone suddenly numb; his bowels feel liquid.

‘If I release it, it will bite you,’ continues the woman. ‘And snakes don’t like being confined. It won’t be happy when I let it out.’

She’s bluffing, Mig thinks. She must be. Why the fuck would they keep one of these creatures in their house? Something that could kill you if it escaped? You’d have to be insane.

He thinks how far away they are from the city. How very far. How isolated. These two, alone on their farm, with their snakes.

‘Death by venom is slow and very painful.’ The woman reaches for the jar, her fingers wrapping around the glass like a caress, sliding it back towards her lap. Mig is overcome with horror. ‘It can take days,’ she says.

She looks at him.

‘Where is the man?’

His mouth is dry. Her fingertips rest on the lid of the jar. The coral snake’s head lifts suddenly, sliding upwards against the side of the glass, revealing the scales of its underbelly. Mig has no idea if she’s telling the truth. If it’s deadly, or not. How can he run the risk?

‘I can’t tell you where he is,’ he says. ‘I can only show you.’

She smiles. For a moment he thinks he’s bought himself some time but then she twists the lid of the jar a fraction to the right.

‘No!’

There is a knock at the door.

‘What?’ snaps the woman.

‘Open up.’

It’s her brother. The woman doesn’t say anything but is unable to suppress a frown of displeasure at the interruption. Mig gathers his wits. Now is the moment, when the door opens. He’ll rush them both. If he knocks one of them off balance, he might make it down the stairs. He tries not to think about all the deadly objects they could hurl after him, or what would happen if they let the snake loose.

With the jar clutched firmly in one hand, the woman unlocks the door. Her brother is standing in the corridor, a strained expression on his face. As the door opens wider, Mig sees the reason for it. The Osirian, Vikram, is behind him, and he has a weapon pointed at the back of the man’s head. A gun.

Mig stares.

‘Mig.’

Vikram’s voice startles him into movement. He sidles past the woman, whose fingers are trembling with rage on the glass, the snake inside shaken about by the movement, its head switching angrily from side to side. Past the man. Past the Osirian. The gun is not like anything he has seen before.

‘Inside,’ says Vikram. The man goes in without a word. Vikram shuts the door and locks it. As they go down the stairs Mig can hear the remonstrations beginning between brother and sister. He can’t help sneaking glances at Vikram, who wields the gun easily, like he’s done this before.

In the yard outside the sun hits him, long and low, the silent machinery casting shadows in the dust. They waste no time in putting distance between themselves and the farm. Vikram is still gripping the gun tightly.

After a while Mig says, ‘I didn’t know you had that.’

‘There’s a lot you don’t know,’ says Vikram, and Mig, taking the hint, shuts up.

‘What did you tell them?’

Vikram shows no external signs of anger, but Mig senses he isn’t going to wriggle out of this one so easily. He tries anyway.

‘Nothing much.’

‘Mig. What did you tell them?’

He mutters, ‘I told them you’d survived.’

‘You told them I’d survived.’

‘Yes.’

‘Survived the redfleur?’

Mig avoids looking at him. He focuses his eyes on the flat, featureless countryside, everything murky in the dusk. ‘Yes.’ He blurts out, ‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘Do you want us to be caught?’

‘No!’

‘Do you want me to be caught?’

‘No.’

‘There was one condition to our travelling together, Mig. You remember what it was?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. He’s screwed up. He’s screwed up and they both know it. He waits for the inevitable recriminations. ‘Are you sending me away?’

Vikram looks at him for a long time, the expression on his face making it impossible to turn away. Under that stare, Mig feels the importance drain out of him until he’s as low as a worm.

‘If this happens again, I won’t have a choice. You’re smarter than this, Mig. You’d better prove it to me.’

Mig waits, expecting more, but the Osirian appears to be finished. He changes the subject and talks of other things. His Spanish improves all the time. He asks Mig questions about Patagonia and Patagonian people, questions which Mig sometimes struggles to answer, or answers warily, unsure if they contain some trick or test. Eventually he works up the courage to ask.

‘What’s that gun?’

‘You mean where did it come from?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It was made in Osiris.’

‘Your city?’

Vikram hesitates before he says, ‘Yes.’

‘And you’re going back there?’

‘Yes.’

They assess one another. Mig is no longer sure, if he ever had an inkling, of what is going through the Osirian’s head.

He is surprised when Vikram reaches into his pack and withdraws the mysterious black stone which Mig has seen him examining in secret on so many nights.

‘Do you know what this is?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘It’s a holoma. You’ve never seen one before?’

‘No. What does it do?’

‘It’s a way of sending messages. It belonged to the Antarctican.’

Mig looks at him uneasily.

‘Like robotics?’

‘Something like that.’

Mig makes the sign of the spider. He isn’t superstitious, not remotely, not like the kids back home, but you can’t be too careful with shit like this. Robotics are a breeding ground for demons.

‘What do you want it for?’

‘I need to send a message.’ Vikram pauses and Mig guesses he is weighing up whether to trust him. ‘The Antarctican. Taeo Ybanez. He had a partner back home. She deserves to know the truth about how he died. But we should get some rest. We need to make progress tomorrow.’

Mig takes the hint and goes to lie down, but finds it impossible to sleep. As he lies awake, riddled with remorse, listening to the steady rhythm of the Osirian’s breathing and the click of night-time insects, Mig wonders what Pilar would have made of this odd man and his faraway city in the ocean. He sees her squatting on the roof of Station Sabado, her hair a tangle of bright dyed feathers, her expression caught between habitual truculence and the quiet bliss that enters her face only when listening to music. He sees her looking down on the plaza with the Cataveiro trams approaching the station, and his heart breaks over again.
He’s a madman, Mig
. That’s what Pilar would say.
This one’s touched
.

Touched or not, Mig sticks with him. But when, after weeks of travel, they arrive at the coast and look out over that same ocean – which Mig has never seen before, an unimaginable, restless thing which fills him with an equal sense of limitlessness and terror – there are things which he does not tell Vikram.

He does not tell him about the hours he has spent daydreaming about how to kill the Alaskan. He doesn’t want to have to see the freak’s face when he does it – the idea of looking into those cold, soulless eyes as she dies is intolerable – so his options are limited. But there are ways.

He does not tell Vikram that at the last farmhouse he visited, the farmer took hold of Mig’s arm and grasped it with the kind of fervency usually displayed by Born Again Mayans.

‘You’re a traveller, aren’t you?’ said the farmer.

‘I’m going to sea,’ said Mig. His revised cover story, dull but safe.

‘Then maybe you’ve heard. On your travels. Have you heard – about the man?’

‘What man?’

The farmer’s grip on his arm increased and Mig twisted away, annoyed, and knowing what was coming but seeing no way to avoid it. The farmer’s eyes shone.

‘The man who survived the redfleur!’

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Mig. ‘Who is he?’

‘How do you like the ocean?’ Vikram asks him.

Mig doesn’t want to sound too impressed. He doesn’t want Vikram to know that his heart is racing at the sight of the waves, their fierce white caps, the way they crash with such wanton aggression upon the rocks. Or that his only wish is that Pilar could be standing beside him, for him to sweep his arm wide across the vista and say to her, as though he had conjured it,
what do you think of this?
A flock of birds take turns diving at the ocean, the successful returning with some unlucky fish to screech and squabble over. How he longs for wings, or a flying machine like that woman he helped in Cataveiro, to take him away from here, back in time, before it all went so wrong.

‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s where I come from,’ replies the Osirian. His face is impassive.

Mig licks his lips and tastes salt. He watches a boat move slowly across the water, drawing a white tail behind it. He imagines Pilar is alive and on that boat.

‘So what do we do now?’

‘We find somewhere to hide.’ The Osirian turns away from the sea. ‘Come on. We’ve got work to do.’

THE ALASKAN WHEELS
along the quiet, cool corridors of the island’s hospital until she finds the room she is looking for. It is easy to identify: two plainclothes bodyguards stand to attention outside. They eye the Alaskan with suspicion, one moving away from the door, posture shifting in intent, until she holds something up.